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Tim O'Reilly interview - O'Reilly on Linux (part 1)
Tim O'Reilly interview - O'Reilly on Java and the Internet (part 2)
Tim O'Reilly interview - O'Reilly on books (part 3)

You are best known as the founder of O'Reilly books, is there a particular title of which you are most proud, or which has been of most significance to the company?

O'Reilly: There are many through the years, moving as technology has evolved. In our early years, I was most proud of my own book Managing UUCP and Usenet (1986), and its role in helping the early Usenet make the transition from cooperative user network to a commercial network. Then The Whole Internet User's Guide and Catalog (1992) was the book that brought the Internet to the masses. (I remember folks saying we should have gotten a Pulitzer prize for that book. It was selected by the New York Public Library as one of the most significant books of the 20th century, so I guess that's recognition enough!)

And of course, our Xlib Programming Manual (1988), Programming Perl (1991) and Running Linux (1993) were instrumental in helping to validate key open-source technologies. And of course, they were also the books that got us consciously involved in the open-source phenomenon.

I'm also very proud of Java in a Nutshell (1995). This was the key book from which many people learned Java, which remains one of the most significant computing breakthroughs of the last decades. Sun's prescience in understanding that we were moving to network computing really should be appreciated. Java may not have gotten everything right, but its creators saw the future more clearly than just about anyone else. And we've all been reworking that vision for the past eight years.

More recently, I'm proudest of Google Hacks (2003) for proving that we can continue to surf the wavefront of innovation, and find things that other publishers miss that really are the shape of the future. Of course, the fact that we played a small role in actually getting the technology to happen made this one especially sweet.

I'm also pretty darn proud of Mac OS X: The Missing Manual. We saw that Mac OS X was a breakthrough for Apple, and jumped on the opportunity when everyone else had written them off. The book has been our biggest bestseller since The Whole Internet User's Guide.

Overall, what I'm proudest of is that O'Reilly has managed to stay relevant, to find technologies that matter, and to help them 'cross the chasm' from the technical community to a wider community of users.

You are celebrating the 25th anniversary of O'Reilly books, and congratulations for that. But what does the next 25 years hold for the company? You have already branched out from technical works to healthcare and travel writing, haven't you...

O'Reilly: Well, we're not actually celebrating 25 years of O'Reilly books, but of the company O'Reilly & Associates. We started out as a documentation consulting company in 1978, and didn't publish our first books till 1985. But that's a bit of a nit.

Overall, our vision is to continue doing what we do. Our mission is to 'change the world by capturing the knowledge of innovators.' And we hope that we'll be continuing to do that.

More specifically, which subject areas in computing do you expect to be popular over the next few years? i.e. DRM, wireless networking...<

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O'Reilly: Wireless networking is definitely going to be huge. Nicholas Negroponte pointed out years ago that at some point, everything carried over wires (telephony etc.) would go wireless, and everything wireless (television, radio) would go wired, since wires were good for taking data to fixed locations, while wireless is good for data aimed at people, who are inherently mobile.

Not just 802.11 but cellular networks and other new technologies on the horizon are going to be really important. In addition to books like 802.11 Wireless Networks: The Definitive Guide, and Building Wireless Community Networks, we expect to publish a number of other wireless related books.

DRM is a fundamentally bad idea. I don't have any plans to publish in that area.

While Web services books haven't been a huge success yet, I believe (as I outlined above) that the move to 'the Internet operating system' (the world in which the network is the computer) is one of the biggest changes we've all faced. So there's going to be a huge upsurge of retraining to deal with that area.

And of course, Linux, MySQL and other open source topics are going to grow in importance.

And in addition, digital photography, digital video, and other types of rich media are going to be an increasingly important part of all of our lives.

To finish on a personal note, I believe you like reading science-fiction and historical fiction in your leisure time? What is your favourite book, and what are you reading now?

O'Reilly: My favourite book....now that's a hard question. There are a set of books that are very important to me.

Lao Tzu's Tao Te Ching, in the Witter Bynner translation (The Way of Life According to Lao Tzu). Islandia, by Austin Tappan Wright (a utopian fantasy written in the 1930s). The ideal of a slower, more thoughtful life.

Rissa Kerguelen, by F.M. Busby, a science fiction novel about the way that small businesses can play a disruptive, counter-cultural role in a world increasingly dominated by large corporations. (This book was an inspiration to me when I was starting my company.)

Dorothy Dunnett's Lymond series of historical novels about the 16th century world of Scotland, France, and commerce around the Mediterranean. In addition to being fascinating views of bits of history cleverly woven together, these books have a lot of great perspective on the nature of leadership. These are all 'foundation' books for me.

What am I reading now? Thackeray's Vanity Fair. Why? Trollope (whom I also enjoy) thought that this was one of the greatest English novels, and when my daughter read it and loved it, I thought I'd better add it to my repertoire.

Other books I've read recently that I've really enjoyed:

Air Guitar, by Dave Hickey. (The subtitle is 'Essays on Art and Democracy.' To understand why it's so great, you need to read it. Wonderful perspectives from the art world that can be applied to other aspects of our culture.)

Pattern Recognition, by William Gibson. Not one of my favourite science fiction authors, but I really liked this one. Loved some of the images - the 'cool hunter' with allergy to overstated branding.

Science fiction books I've loved in the last few years: Kim Stanley Robinson's magnificent Mars trilogy (Red Mars, Green Mars, Blue Mars.) A great sense of how scientists might remake culture given a fresh canvas.

I could go on, but that's plenty of grist for your mill. This is just off the top of my head. I have about 8,000 books in my house, so there are a lot of them that I like!

Tim O'Reilly interview - O'Reilly on Linux (part 1)
Tim O'Reilly interview - O'Reilly on Java and the Internet (part 2)
Tim O'Reilly interview - O'Reilly on books (part 3)